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Thursday, June 21, 2012

Jill Stein: (Presumptive) 2012 Green Party Presidential Nominee

Jill Stein is a physician and activist from Massachusetts. She's a Harvard graduate and a teacher of Internal Medicine. She calls her platform the Green New Deal, and it has four major components.

The first plank of this platform is to guarantee economic rights for all Americans. This entails the right to a job at a living wage for every American willing and able to work. It also entails the right to quality education, health care, utilities, and housing as well as the right to unionize, to fair taxation and to fair trade.

Dr. Stein has what she calls a Full Employment Program which will create 16 million jobs through a community-based direct employment initiative that is nationally funded, locally controlled and democratically protected.

There are many rights Dr. Stein wants to honor, include a right to quality healthcare through an improved Medicare for All program and a right to tuition-free, quality public education from pre-school through college at public institutions (Jill Stein would forgive student loan debt left over from the current era of unaffordable college education and couple this debt forgiveness with a tuition-free higher education based on the model of the post World War II GI Bill).

Jill Stein believes that it is necessary to halt all foreclosures and evictions and then to create a federal bank with local branches which would take over homes with distressed mortgages. These mortgages could either be restructured to affordable levels, or, if the occupants cannot afford a mortgage, then the homes will be rented to the occupants.

Being an activist for the way the health of the environment affects the health of the person, and being a (presumably, the) Green Party candidate, Dr. Stein as president would redirect research money from fossil fuels and other 'dead-end' industries toward research in wind, solar and geothermal. Along with this, she would invest in research in sustainable, nontoxic materials, closed-loop cycles that eliminate waste and pollution, as well as organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry.

Addressing the financial sector, Jill Stein would restore Glass-Steagall, establish a 90% tax on bonuses for bailed out bankers, regulate financial derivatives, break up the big banks that are 'too big to fail' and nationalize the Federal Reserve.

She would also put in place a Voter's Bill of Rights that would guarantee us a voter-marked paper ballot for all voting and require that all votes are counted before election results are released. It would also replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions, make Election Day a national holiday and bring simplified, safe same-day voter registration to the nation.

With concern to the military and homeland security, Dr. Stein would repeal the PATRIOT Act and the parts of the NDAA that violate civil liberties. She would also call for a 50% reduction in military spending that includes the withdrawal of U.S. military bases from the over 140 countries in which our military is now located.Jill Stein's Website